Bullied 10-Year-Old’s Suicide 8th In School District This Year

LOUISVILLE, KY — Another bullied child has killed himself. Louisville fifth-grader Seven Bridges was 10. He never made it to sixth grade or to his new school, away from the kids who bullied and tormented him over a medical condition. His parents, Tami Charles and Donnie Bridges, promised things would be better next year. Instead, on Saturday, they will bury their only son.

Seven was the youngest of eight students at Jefferson County Public Schools — Kentucky's largest district — to kill himself this school year and the 11th in the district to die by suicide in two years. The number is extraordinarily high, alarming the district enough to call a statewide summit of school superintendents to come up with solutions. Seven's parents contend the high suicide rate shows kids who don't feel safe in their schools aren't getting the support they need.

Seven's mother came home from the grocery store on the morning of Saturday, Jan. 19, to the horrible discovery that her son had hanged himself in her closet. She carries in her mind the image of her son’s lifeless body as she continues discussions with Kerrick Elementary School in Louisville about what was done after an incident last fall in which Seven was choked on the school bus.

In a particularly insidious twist on bullying, his attacker was a friend upset with Seven for refusing to stand up for himself against other bullies.

The family’s nightmare is all too familiar. Experts have called on public health officials to treat bullying as a major public health issue, rather than brush it off as a painful part of growing up. As many as one in three children experience bullying during their school years, setting them up for academic failure, substance abuse and violence, and unhealthy relationships as adults, among other problems.

Family spokeswoman Tracy Moore told Patch Seven’s parents are meeting with lawyers and may sue Jefferson County Public Schools, a stranger to neither litigation over bullying nor student suicides. Three years ago, six families who sued the district in federal court said school officials hadn’t protected their children from bullying so severe it put the kids in fear for their lives.

Seven had been mercilessly taunted over a medical condition at birth that required him to wear a colostomy bag. He kept a spare set of clothing at Kerrick Elementary because the bag sometimes leaked, resulting in embarrassing odors that some kids seized on as a reason to bully him, Charles has said.

In Facebook Live videos (here, here and here) and media interviews, Tami Charles asked both Kerrick Elementary and Jefferson County Public Schools to investigate the situation, then accused the assistant principal at her son’s school of giving her family the run-around. Charles said the school official told her he had talked to the bus driver, but claimed there was “no referral, no incident report, no paperwork.”

Jefferson County Public Schools did not return Patch’s repeated requests for comment. But district Superintendent Marty Pollio, who on Saturday attended a balloon release celebrating the gentle spirit of a boy a pastor said “walked with God,” told The Courier-Journal that school officials will “get to the bottom of how things were addressed at the school level.”

District spokeswoman Renee Murphy told television station WHAS that though she couldn’t address the specifics of disciplinary measures taken after Seven was choked, “matters were addressed,” and the school district will review its handling of the bullying investigation.

“We are devastated. Our hearts are breaking for this family. This school community is hurting right now,” Murphy told the news station after learning of Seven’s death.

A Call For Change: 7 For Seven

Tami Charles told The Courier-Journal that she has been taking calls from other Louisville parents who shared stories about their own children who had been bullied or may have contemplated suicide.

Moore, the family spokeswoman, told Patch that after Seven killed himself, his parents compiled a “7 for Seven” list of demands of the school district. They are:

1. A public acknowledgement and apology from Kerrick Elementary personnel the family accused of failing to take the bullying Seven experienced seriously;
2. Immediate mediation with staff and parents (of the bully and the bullied student) within 48 hours when a bullying complaint is made;
3. Emergency transfer to another school for students who are perpetually bullied;
4. Copies of all incidents involving Seven and the unedited video of the incident, as well as all investigative evidence acquired (emails, statements from witnesses, etc.) and a public accounting of resolutions and conclusions of the investigation;
5. Disciplinary action against all staff the family accuses of failing to intervene, as well as the resignation of the district superintendent and the firing of an assistant principal at Seven’s school;
6. Immediate audit and investigation by the Kentucky Board of Education, Attorney General Andy Beshear and State Auditor Mike Harmon for the eight students who have committed suicide;
7. A 25 percent to 50 percent increase in crisis counselors and mental health professionals within the school district who specialize in bullying.

Spike In Student Suicides

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a 2017 report that bullying and suicide are closely related, and that kids who bully others and their targets are at increased risk to take their lives.

The CDC said it continues to learn more about the link between bullying and suicide, but it does know this: "It is correct to say that involvement in bullying, along with other risk factors, increases the chance that a young person will engage in suicide-related behaviors.”

Jefferson County Public Schools began keeping a tally of student suicides this school year after officials noticed they seemed to be on the uptick. Murphy, the district spokeswoman, told The Courier-Journal that it “felt significant and different from from previous years” and school officials are working on a suicide prevention video and other materials for students in its 156 schools.

But when Seven hanged himself, officials decided more needed to be done. Pollio told The Courier-Journal that superintendents from school districts across the state will be invited to a summit on suicide prevention. Among the issues they’re worried about is what the CDC and others call a “suicide cluster.” Researchers have found there can be a “contagion” aspect to suicides — that is, people may kill themselves after people around them kill themselves.

Suicides among teenagers are increasing in Kentucky, where the number of Kentucky kids who killed themselves doubled between 2014 and 2016, from 19 to 44, according to state public health officials. And the 2017 Kentucky Youth Risk Behavior Study found that 15 percent, or one in seven, high school students in the state seriously considered killing themselves in a 12-month period. The survey also showed that nearly one in five students had seriously thought about suicide at some point in their lives.

That's below the national average, but suicide is the second-leading cause of death among Kentuckians ages 10-34. Among all age groups, more than twice as many Kentuckians die by suicide annually than by homicide, and one person dies by suicide about every 12 hours in Kentucky, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

In 2017, more than 2,300 U.S. children under the age of 18 died by suicide — a huge jump from a decade earlier, when 1,231 youth suicides were reported, the agency said.

'A Den Of Anarchy'

Jefferson County Public Schools' new initiatives expand on an anti-bullying tip line started in the 2015-2016 school year that gave students and their parents a way to make toll-free calls to file a report online with the district’s bullying prevention office. After the first full year the service was in effect, more than 240 calls were received and each one was followed up on and resolved, bullying prevention resource teacher Cheryl Dolson told WHAS in 2017.

Teddy Gordon, a lawyer representing most of the families who sued Jefferson County Public Schools in 2016, told the news station that if bullying prevention efforts were working, the number of calls to the tip line would have decreased. But they haven’t, he maintains.

The lawsuit by six Crosby Middle School parents and grandparents was unprecedented in that it was filed in federal court and claimed civil rights violations. The students said the daily torment was such that they were “scared for their lives” and that they were battered until they were bloody, according to the complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Louisville. Gordon, the families' lawyer, called the school “a den of anarchy.”

The families reached confidential settlements late last year and the school district paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to television station WDRB, which retrieved the information from other court documents.

Among the families paid damages were Bethany Littlefield, who told the television station her son “attempted to end his pain the only way he knew how” and was hospitalized for psychiatric care, and Natalie Scott, now 21, who told the station she transferred to another school after getting death threats in her locker.

The bullying cases outlined in the lawsuit dated back to 2014, but the problems at Jefferson County Public Schools go back longer. After an 8-year-old Somalian child who reportedly had been bullied was found hanging in a bathroom stall at Frayser Elementary School in 2011, the school district was ordered in an unrelated lawsuit to pay $60,000 to his family, according to news reports.

Two other students lifted him from the hook, but if not for their intervention, “he would have died,” Gordon said.

'Balls Were Dropped'

Though the school district has had anti-bullying tools in place for about three years now, Seven’s mother thinks “balls … were dropped.”

“It wasn't that JCPS didn”t have these tools, they just weren't at our school,” Charles told WHAS.

David Holton, a retired Jefferson County juvenile court judge, oversaw hundreds of cases of bullying, some ending as tragically as Seven’s did. He told WHAS that during his 10 years on the bench, the sheer volume of bullying cases was “just amazing to me.”

“The whole attitude these days that you can say whatever it is you want to say to somebody and treat anyone anyway you want to treat them, it's just wrong,” Holton told the news station. “Where's the whole decency that we're supposed to have in society?”

Tami Charles doesn’t want her son to be forgotten, or for another student to endure the torture he did.

“We need to talk about this bullying,” Charles told televison station WAVE. “Talk about this pain. I want people to do that with their children.”

Because Seven died by suicide, life insurance will not cover the funeral expenses. More than $100,000 has been raised on GoFundMe for his funeral, burial and his parents’ lost wages.

“The fight is long from over,” Seven's mother wrote on the crowdfunding page. “Our goal is to see that everyone that ignored our plea is brought to justice …”

Seven Charles Thomas Bridges' wake will be Friday, Feb. 1. The funeral will be Saturday.

Photo via GoFundMe, a Patch promotional partner

The Menace Of Bullies: A Patch Series

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